#54 Saman Farid: America Doesn’t Have a Robot Problem. It Has a Deployment Problem.
Saman Farid, founder and CEO of Formic, talks with Jordan on Going Direct about deploying robots in American factories, the barriers to adoption, and how robotics as a service can help manufacturers expand production.
In this talk
- 3:44
Why small manufacturers matter
Farid says factory visits reveal the engineering and coordination behind everyday products. He describes small and midsize suppliers as essential to larger manufacturers, often supporting local jobs and serving as family-run businesses across generations.
- 11:18
Why automation is hard to adopt
Farid points to both operational and cultural hurdles: factory owners know their products but may not know how to select, deploy, or maintain robots, while costly custom integration can leave buyers exposed to delays and change orders. He says the risk of change can also be harder for family-run or private equity-owned businesses to take on.
- 20:12
Robots can raise factory utilization
Farid describes labor availability as a constraint, citing one 165-person factory that hired 250 people in 2025 just to keep positions filled. He estimates a typical U.S. factory operates for about 2,000 to 3,000 hours a year, compared with roughly 6,000 hours for a fuller schedule, and argues robots can help run more shifts and take on repetitive work.
- 26:56
Formic bundles deployment and support
Formic owns and operates robots, handling assessment, engineering, installation, monitoring, maintenance, and spare parts for a monthly or hourly fee. Farid says its team scans factories, matches tasks to standard hardware, and can quote on site; installations are typically operational within four hours. The company serves more than 100 manufacturers and offers systems for palletizing, case packing, material movement, machine tending, and injection molding.
- 43:20
Scaling requires field data and financing
Farid says manufacturing’s decentralized structure creates coordination costs, and that software, AI, and robotics can help manage them. He emphasizes that reliable factory performance requires sustained field operation, not just a successful demo, and that customer deployments generate useful training data. Formic also built asset financing into its model, starting facilities in 2021 and completing its first full-scale securitization in 2025.
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